sharpening the ploughshares

mhsteger:

Umberto Eco (born 5 January, 1932), pictured above in a photograph taken in India in 2005 by T. Singaravelou (from The Hindu)

‘There are two ways of walking through a wood. The first is to try one of several routes (so as to get out of the wood as fast as possible, say, or to reach the house of grandmother, Tom Thumb, or Hansel and Gretel); the second is to walk so as to discover what the wood is like and find out why some paths are accessible and others are not.  Similarly, there are two ways of going through a narrative text…’

—from Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994)